ColdFusion Development

ColdFusion is…

“ColdFusion is not dead. It’s alive and it is here to stay” …. This is a common slogan found around the web popularized mostly by ColdFusion evangelists connected to Adobe who owns the CF technology.

Although we agree that ColdFusion ‘is here to stay’, we believe that it will stay for reasons not necessarily related to what these evangelists are telling us.

Yes, the new ColdFusion (as of this writing, version 2021) provides a robust server technology with a great programming scripting capabilities and intuitive interface. Yes, developing ColdFusion applications is still faster than developing in ASP, PHP, Python and most likely any other programming server technology language. We could list all the pros (and cons) of ColdFusion here, but … it doesn’t really matter. The world moved on! To be exact, the IT staff moved on. Web developers, server IT guys, hosting companies, they all moved to other technologies. Don’t believe me? Try to search for ColdFusion developers and see how many search results you get. Well, that is probably why you are reading this article 🙂

Why ColdFusion Development is Still Needed 

To understand it, we need to go back 20 years when ColdFusion was a ‘go to’ platform for any business that wanted to get an online presence and this presence was to be more than a static HTML content. ColdFusion was a perfect choice for ecommerce shops, CRM systems, websites that required content management, message boards, you name it.
Why was the ColdFusion a perfect solution? Because it was a very easy platform to learn by beginner programmers. I know, I was one of them. In 1999 as an ASP programmer, it took me 2 months to become an ‘expert’: a ColdFusion Certified Specialist. Because it was so easy to learn the platform, all the new ‘experts’ jumped on the bandwagon and…started to promote ColdFusion.

In the early 2000s  small and medium businesses finally understood that the web was not just AOL. 

So when asking for quotes on their projects, most often a ColdFusion developer would provide a lowest quote. To give you a perspective, my first ever client asked me for a quote to build a social media website for teenagers (Yes, there was a world before Facebook). I quoted her something around 6K. Couple of years later when we became good friends  I asked her what was the closest estimate to mine…it was more than 100K higher (that really hurt). Anyway, that is how ColdFusion started to take over the world! Inexpensive entry to a digital age was a key factor.

Now let’s explain why ColdFusion is here to stay!

Answer was already provided: Because ColdFusion was a very inexpensive way to build an application 20 years ago! 

 Let’s explain it with the following example. 11 years ago we implemented a small CRM project for a startup in a medical industry. Altogether it took us about 250 work hours from start to production. A month later, this client approached us to add a new functionality. Well, these additions continued for years to come! As of today we recorded over 6,000 work hours on this now large scale ColdFusion application. 
So if we wanted to recreate this application using a modern server platform with a shiny new framework, we are looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs. Sometimes it’s necessary to bite the bullet and do it (which we sometimes do), but for many small businesses this is simply not an option. Hence they will need to stay with ColdFusion and hope it stays alive (read: Adobe doesn’t kill it)

Migration and Technology Costs That Matter

So how can we help? 

Well, as you can probably guess we’ve been developing ColdFusion applications for over 20 years. Whether this technology is outdated or not, someone has to help to support it if necessary and migrate if a need arises. We have extensive experience in both and want to help you with the process. 

BTW, one thing we will not try to sell you: We will not offer to build a new application using ColdFusion. There are better alternatives 🙂

Tom Mach
CEO, Binary Minds